Sunday, June 5, 2011

Classical Liberalism and Classical Liberals

Mike Huben poses the question: “I never see a list of who the classical liberals were and who their contemporaries were who were not classical liberals.”

Classical liberalism was a political and philosophical tradition, often distinct from later political liberalism as in organised political parties, and it is also necessary to distinguish political liberalism from economic liberalism.

Liberalism originally consisted in opposition to state power. Classical liberals of the 18th and 19th centuries were left-wing because they defended individual rights and laissez-faire, while conservatives were absolutist defenders of the centralized state and the divine right of kings. In the UK, this Classical liberal tradition existed well before the formation of the Whig party, which dominated Britain between 1688 and the 1830s. In the 1830s, the Whig party split: the progressives joined with the Utilitarians, democrats, and some Chartists to form the Liberal Party, whilst others joined the Conservative party. The term “Liberal” was used c. 1830, and British liberalism continued developing in different forms until the Liberal party was crushingly defeated in 1922. Keynes, as a matter of fact, regarded himself as in the British Liberal tradition, and was neither a Marxist or socialist.

I give a list of Classical liberals and some of the New (“Progressive”) British Liberals below.

12 comments:

Interestingly, von Mises dismissed him as a socialist in Human Action. Mill's comments on co-operatives are interesting, though. This suggests something more than a classical liberal -- a liberal socialist, perhaps?

> Thomas Hodgskin

His early works are distinctly socialist in their analysis and critique of capital. Marx was impressed by them, for example.

This is a pathetic attempt at legitimizing today's left - aka progressive movement which has nothing to do with liberalism.You are a proponent of social democracies. Nothing about social democracies is consistent with classical liberalism. Individual liberty / freedom is a pre-requisite of classical liberalism. Social democracies promote creation of rights other than natural rights (such as right to healthcare among others). You CANNOT create such rights without intruding in to natural rights of man as specified in the Declaration of Independence. Therefore social democracies are WHOLLY INCONSISTENT with classical liberalism.Thus your pathetic attempt to legitimize the left - the progressive left which you are a part of - by making bogus, non-exisiting connections with classical liberalism.

In fact, utilitarianism came to be a major ethical theory of Classical liberalism by teh 19th century, and liberals like John Stuart Mill were already making the case for state interventions on utilitarian grounds.

"Liberalism originally consisted in opposition to state power. Classical liberals of the 18th and 19th centuries were left-wing because they defended individual rights and laissez-faire, while conservatives were absolutist defenders of the centralized state and the divine right of kings."

I would at the very least rephrase that first sentence: liberalism consisted of opposition to PRIVATE OWNERSHIP of state power. Thus natural rights were invented to counter the equally invented rights of kings. But very few liberals opposed the centralized state: they desperately wanted something more manageable than a king or dictator.

Are these all classical liberals except the new liberals? Are the Whig conservatives classical liberals?

Why are the first 9 dateless and not in the various subclasses?

By what standards are all these people classical liberals?

How did you compose this list?

What is the range of variation among the supposedly unifying characteristics of classical liberals?

Which are primarily economists and not political philosophers?

you list John Stuart Mill twice

John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon are missingAlexander Hamilton and John Jay are missing

Consequently, a central question of liberal political theory is whether political authority can be justified, and if so, how. It is for this reason that social contract theory, as developed by Thomas Hobbes (1948 [1651]), John Locke (1960 [1689]), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1973 [1762]) and Immanuel Kant (1965 [1797]), is usually viewed as liberal even though the actual political prescriptions of, say, Hobbes and Rousseau, have distinctly illiberal features.

"I still would like to know by what standard all these people are classical liberals. Or perhaps a standard for excluding people as classical liberals."

Well, many of British people above were members of the British liberal party after c. 1830. There was a 19th century German liberal party too whose important members are listed above.

People who self-identify as liberals would seem to be a good starting point!

Before 1830s the Whig party was the natural home of classical liberals, or people who

(1) urging constitutional govrnment, and an end to despotism.

(2) some kind of limited government

(3) liberty of individuals including freedom of religion, speech, and freedom of the press

(4) A secular attitute to government and society, although some of the French liberals were strongly anti-religious and anti-clerical

(5) some commitment to free markets and laissez faire.

But again there were different strands. So, for example, some liberals were fairly disgusted by the effects of industrialization and free markets, and were urging remedial interventions by government even by the late 18th century. Chomsky calls these people "pre-capitalist" Classical liberals.

Also, there was a split between those who supported (1) natural rights ethics and (2) utilitarian ethics.

Utilitarianism led itself to support a greater role for the state.

Also, a lot of 18th century liberals were deists and sometimes quite harsh critics of organised Chrstianity. Sometimes you got the occasional atheist too.

Voltaire is famous for his hatred of and lifelong opposition to the Catholic church and its horrible superstitions. He was actually still having to defend people from being burned at the stake for blasphemy in the 18th century:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_de_la_Barre

People just forget how brutal and horrific some forms of 18th century Christianity were.